The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web combined with the development of OLTP applications has enabled companies to transact business globally in real time. It is desirable that trading parties within an OLTP environment have sufficient knowledge concerning the historical trading reputation of their trading partners. Insufficient reputation information can lead to users' reluctance to engage in transactions due to a lack of trust between trading partners. Current methods of providing and displaying reputation information in OLTP environments rely on gross measures of user ratings, typically a numerical ranking from one to three (corresponding to a trading reputation of best to worst). While this method provides some important information, users are in need of increasingly detailed reputation information as a way to ensure that the transactions will transpire successfully, especially as the value of transactions reaches into the hundreds and thousands of dollars. Also, users may need to focus only on specific information concerning a trading partner's reputation, such as how rapidly a buyer sends payment for an item or how rapidly a seller responds to communication attempts. Users may also require aggregate reputation information that ranks users across several performance parameters.
Further, the growth of service trading within the OLTP environment has necessitated a technique for users to provide feedback on how well the service was performed, whether it was performed in a timely fashion, etc.
Although some tracking of users' transaction performance ratings is presently conducted in select OLTP environments, some important technical hurdles have stood in the way of providing detailed customer feedback ratings. For example, the collection of transaction feedback data has historically been difficult because an OLTP environment may provide only the venue for trading, and may not be directly involved in the transaction once a product or service has been purchased. This has necessitated the development of data collection and data tracking capabilities beyond those normally available. Other technical challenges have included the need to develop a means for sorting and processing large amounts of feedback data using database structures and mathematical algorithms, as well as a means for displaying user transaction performance data in a format that is easily interpreted.
Some methods for providing and displaying user comments in online environments are known in the industry. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,094,675, “Electronic discussion system for exchanging information among users,” assigned to Hitachi, Ltd. (Tokyo, JP), describes an electronic discussion system of the client/server structure for an electronic exchange of messages that are presented by a plurality of users and shown on a display of a client computer, wherein the servers comprise at least one storage server for holding detailed contents of respective pieces of opinion information, and at least one discussion server for holding opinion indexes showing the storage locations of opinion contents of respective pieces of opinion information, wherein the clients comprise an opinion writing client for transferring and writing the opinion index created from a newly presented piece of opinion information and the opinion content into the discussion server and the storage server, and a reading client for referring to opinion indexes and opinion contents recorded and managed in the discussion server and the storage server.
However, the '675 patent does not provide a method for submitting or displaying user transaction performance ratings in an online trading environment, nor does it allow the provision or display of detailed user reputation information grouped by performance categories. Therefore, what is needed is a system for and method of providing and displaying enhanced feedback in an OLTP environment.